Long Day's Journey into Night (Yale Nota Bene)

Long Day’s Journey into Night

LONG DAY’S
J·O·U·R·N·E·Y
INTO NIGHT

——— SECOND EDITION ———

EUGENE O’NEILL

with a foreword by Harold Bloom

Yale University Press New Haven & London

First published as a Yale Nota Bene book in 2002.

Copyright © as an unpublished work 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.
Copyright © 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.
First published February 1956.
Copyright © renewed 1984 by Yale University.
Corrected edition copyright © 1989 by Yale University.
Foreword copyright © 1987 by Harold Bloom. Foreword originally published in a slightly different version by Chelsea House in its Modern Critical Interpretation Series.

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Library of Congress control number: 2001097735

ISBN: 0-300-09410-8 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-300-09305-5 (pbk.)

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CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Long Day’s Journey into Night, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the copyright union, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, television, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. All inquiries regarding this play should be addressed to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Trustees of C. M. O’Neill, One Wall Street, New York, N.Y. 10005.

THE EUGENE O’NEILL COLLECTION was founded at the Yale University Library in 1931 by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill. It includes notes, photographs, and the manuscripts of plays, among them LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. All royalties from the sale of the Yale editions of this book go to Yale University for the benefit of the Eugene O’Neill Collection, for the purchase of books in the field of drama, and for the establishment of Eugene O’Neill Scholarships in the Yale School of Drama.

Frontispiece: Wood engraving by Michael McCurdy

Foreword

I

It is an inevitable oddity that the principal American dramatist to date should have no American precursors. Eugene O’Neill’s art as a playwright owes most to Strindberg’s, and something crucial, though rather less, to Ibsen’s. Intellectually, O’Neill’s ancestry also has little to do with American tradition, with Emerson or William James or any other of our cultural speculators. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud formed O’Neill’s sense of what little was possible for any of us. Even where American literary tradition was strongest, in the novel and poetry, it did not much affect O’Neill. His novelists were Zola and Conrad; his poets were Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne. Overwhelmingly an Irish-American, with his Jansenist Catholicism transformed into anger at God, he had little active interest in the greatest American writer, Whitman, though his spiritual darkness has a curious, antithetical relation to Whitman’s overt analysis of our national character.

Yet O’Neill, despite his many limitations, is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most: Williams, Miller, Wilder, Albee, Kushner, perhaps Mamet and Shepard. A national quality that is literary, yet has no clear relation to our domestic literary traditions, is nearly always present in O’Neill’s strongest works. We can recognize Hawthorne in Henry James, and Whitman (however repressed) in T. S. Eliot, while the relation of Hemingway and Faulkner to Mark Twain is just as evident as their debt to Conrad. Besides the question of his genre (since there was no vital American drama before O’Neill), there would seem to be some hidden factor that governed O’Neill’s ambiguous relation to our literary past. It was certainly not the lack of critical discernment on O’Neill’s part. His admiration for Hart Crane’s poetry, at its most difficult, was solely responsible for the publication of Crane’s first volume, White Buildings, for which O’Neill initially offered to write the introduction, withdrawing in favor of Allen Tate when the impossibility of his writing a critical essay on Crane’s complexities became clear to O’Neill. But to have recognized Hart Crane’s genius, so early and so helpfully, testifies to O’Neill’s profound insights into the American literary imagination at its strongest.

The dramatist whose masterpieces are The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, and, in a class just short of those, A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet, is not exactly to be regarded as a celebrator of the possibilities of American life. The central strain in our literature remains Emersonian, from Whitman to our contemporaries like Saul Bellow and John Ashbery. Even the tradition that reacted against Emerson—from Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville through Gnostics of the abyss like Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon—remains always alert to transcendental and extraordinary American possibilities. Robert Penn Warren must be the most overtly anti-Emersonian partisan in our history, yet even Warren seeks an American Sublime in his still-ongoing poetry. O’Neill would appear to be the most non-Emersonian author of any eminence in our literature. Irish-American through and through, with an heroic resentment of the New England Yankee tradition, O’Neill from the start seemed to know that his spiritual quest was to undermine Emerson’s American religion of self-reliance.

O’Neill’s own Irish Jansenism is curiously akin to the New England Puritanism he opposed, but that only increased the rancor of his powerful polemic in Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and More Stately Mansions. The Will to Live is set against New England Puritanism in what O’Neill himself once called “the battle of moral forces in the New England scene" to which he said he felt closest as an artist. But since this is Schopenhauer’s rapacious Will to Live, and not Bernard Shaw’s genial revision of that Will into the Life Force of a benign Creative Evolution, O’Neill is in the terrible position of opposing one death-drive with another. Only the inescapable Strindberg comes to mind as a visionary quite as negative as O’Neill, so that The Iceman Cometh might as well have been called The Dance of Death, and Long Day’s Journey into Night could be retitled The Ghost Sonata. O’Neill’s most powerful self-representations—as Edmund in Long Day’s Journey and Larry Slade in Iceman—are astonishingly negative identifications, particularly in an American context.

Edmund and Slade do not long for death in the mode of Whitman and his descendants—Wallace Stevens, T.